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Violin Workshop March 06

Emily Koh -Little Pieces for Violin

Emily Koh's Little Pieces for Violin came across as one of the most interesting submissions for the workshop.
In the first piece, bar 6, Susanne said the marking of three bow changes on the low G was impracticle, and might be better left just staccato. The middle of the three bowings would otherwise be an up bow and less effective.

In the second piece the marking in bar 15-18 for ricochet on an upbow was also impracticle. Susanne said ricochet is usually only on the down bow, and the effect she suspected Emily wanted
could be acheived by simply marking the notes ricochet and staccato (see the separate mp3 below for a discussion of this passage).

In bar 29 onwards, the across the strings passage is difficult to acheive successfully. If playing the notes written,
Susanne had to move hand positions a lot, creating an ungainly effect. In the end she
played all the notes as perfect fifths (involving holding down two fingers over two strings each) and just played the lowest note as written for each arpeggio. This was still difficult to tune, but it was felt
this was perhaps closer to the 'easy' sound we suspect Emily wanted.

Finally the passage with left hand pizz worked well until b49 where the changes of hand position made it difficult. Susanne suggested sitting with a chart of the violin positions and trying to work out what was playable.